A story called Difficult People, written many years later when Chekhov was twenty-six, evokes the family scene in his childhood. One of the boys is leaving home the next day to go on the seven-hundred-mile journey to Moscow University and is asking for money to pay for his fare and keep. The family is at table. The father boils up in a rage of self-pity.
“Take everything!” he shouted in an unnatural voice; “plunder me! Take it all! Strangle me!” He jumped up from the table, clutched at his head and ran staggering about the room. “Strip me to the last thread. Squeeze out the last drop! Rob me! Wring my neck!”
We notice the word “unnatural,” which conveys Chekhov’s ear for the false in his people.
The boy defies the father. We see him leave the house in the autumn drizzle, his defiance changing to fear, from fear to self-pity and eventually to despair. And then, as so often in Chekhov’s stories, an irrelevant sight gives a turning point to the boy’s feelings. A rich old lady, a landowner, drives by in an elegant carriage and he bows, smiling.
And at once he caught himself … in that smile…. Where did it come from if his whole heart was full of vexation and misery? And he thought nature itself had given man this capacity for lying, that even in difficult moments of spiritual strain he might be able to hide the secrets of his nest as the fox and the wild duck do.
For the boy knows the gossip that even in the life of that rich old lady there had been terrible troubles. Her father had been exiled by the Tsar, her husband, a gambler, had been ruined, her four sons had turned to the bad. What terrible family scenes there had been! And yet she smiled!
The student thought of his comrades, who did not like talking about their families; he thought of his mother, who almost always lied when she had to speak of her husband and children.
The boy turns back to his house and decides to have it out with his father. And so the row starts up again: the timid mother listens speechlessly. The boy shouts:
“Not a dinner or tea passes without your making an uproar. Your bread sticks in our throat…. You have worn my mother out and made a slave of her, my sister is hopelessly crushed, while I …”
The father shouts back. The boy goes to bed and cannot sleep. Twice his mother comes from behind the screen and makes the sign of the cross over him. He can hear his father pacing the floor all night. At five in the morning the boy gets up once more, calls out good-bye to them alclass="underline" he is going. As he passes his father’s room the father calls out quiedy, “The money is on the round table,” without turning, as he too says good-bye.
A cold, hateful rain was falling as the labourer drove him to the station. The sunflowers were drooping their heads still lower, and the grass seemed darker than ever.
Chekhov’s own drama, when he was sixteen, was more desperate. It was not he who left home in panic and temper. This time the father, indeed the whole family, left suddenly to escape from Taganrog, leaving him behind.
If Pavel was a narrow man, laying down the moral law, he had a Micawber in his nature. The top-hatted figure on the town council and in the processions of Taganrog had had to buy a larger house as the family grew, but he had chosen a bad moment. The railway age had come to Russia late. The larger and more important trading city of Rostov-on-Don at the estuary of the great navigable river Don had become an important railway terminal. There had been a proposal for a branch line to Taganrog but the citizens there had havered about paying the large and necessary bribe for this valuable connection. In the end the town fathers settled for an absurd compromise: a branch line fourteen miles inland from their town. They reckoned that to build a road to the station would be cheaper. In fact building a road cost more. Big ships were turning away from Taganrog, the harbor was neglected and silted up and commerce declined, and the trade of common shopkeepers like Pavel was hit. Soon the aging Pavel went bankrupt. He had borrowed money on note of hand, the lender foreclosed and Pavel could not pay. He was ruined and liable to the law. He fled the town. There was a rumor that he fled secredy to relations in Moscow, hidden in a goods wagon, leaving his wife and children to follow with what family possessions they could carry. The creditor was “merciful” to some extent: he took over house and shop and let the family go, on condition that they left Anton behind as a hostage. Anton was still at school, and the man shrewdly arranged for him to stay on for three years until he graduated, provided that he tutored his son at a cheap rate.
Chapter Two
Anton’s situation as a cynically abandoned child is in some respects similar to the fate of Dickens when he was put to work in the blacking factory. There was the difference that Anton was still at school and free of his father’s rule and his dread of being beaten. He hated the separation from his brothers and his sister and feared for them: above all he felt responsibility for his helpless mother. This seems to be the moment when he first felt that he was the one with the duty and the wit to replace the father as the practical savior of the family and was no longer the neutral watcher of it. If the strict father had indeed broken the will of his two elder brothers, Anton had conserved his. The lonely but self-reliant boy takes responsibility for the dishes, the pots and pans and the sewing machine his mother has left behind and sends them piecemeal to Moscow when he can afford to do so. Soon, pitiably, and in not very literate letters, his mother is begging him to send money. In addition to tutoring the son of the new shopkeeper, he takes on tutoring other boys at school. He sends the money secretly through a rich Moscow cousin, to whom he writes:
If I send letters to my mother, care of you, give them to her when you are alone with her, there are things in life which one can confide in one person only, whom one trusts.
And again:
Please go on comforting my mother, who is both physically and morally broken.
And to his young brother Mikhail he writes a charmingly priggish letter:
I got your letter when I was fearfully bored and was sitting at the gate yawning, so you can judge how welcome that immense letter was. Your writing is good, and in the whole letter I have not found one mistake in spelling. But one thing I don’t like.
He lectures Mikhail for calling himself “your worthless and insignificant brother.”
You recognize your insignificance? … Recognize it before God; perhaps, too, in the presence of beauty, intelligence, nature, but not before men.
And then he gives him a precious literary lecture. Harriet Beecher Stowe had been widely read in Russia at the time of the campaign for the liberation of the serfs. Mikhail had said that the story had “wrung tears from my eyes.” Anton replies:
I read her once, and six months ago read her again with the object of studying her—and … I had an unpleasant sensation which mortals feel after eating too many raisins or currants.
He tells his brother to read Don Quixote “by Cervantes, who is said to be almost on a level with Shakespeare,” and advises Mikhail to tell his elder brothers to read Turgenev’s essay “Hamlet and Don Quixote.” “You won’t understand it, my dear.” He also recommends—and this is a sign of Anton’s resdessness and longing for the adventures of travel—Gon-charov’s The Frigate Pallada. The children of the fierce Pavel had all turned out to be readers.